Computer-Shaped Problems
Transcript read by a machine from the typewritten page. The typos are mine or the machine’s.
I've always found giving things away to be far more interestin & than selling them. I posted all of my writing for twenty years without the hope of being paid for it. Every web project I've undertaken, including every video I've ever recorded has been creative commons licensed. I am a big believer in the ireedom oi information, and I never thought that my contributions were worth putting behind copyright or a pajiwall. I don't begrudge those who feel differently, but I struggle even more now with the idea that creating silos is the best wayto create value.
And I know even less what to do with a whole bunch of the contributions that are now co-owned by me and my AI friend Claude. Surely. it isn't too much to ask that stuff that you only guided is made available for the world to take advantage of, to remix, to build upam? Sure, you paid for the service, but the hundreds of hours of coding that you didn't learn fed more like a public good than almost anything else. If we are going to ruin the environmen! over it; if we are going to destroy jobs over it, we might as wel. open source everything that is produced by AI, everything that it has taken the hours of compute time to build. The lifetines of coding that me dow done in seconds. Surely, all of that should be all of ours.
I saw on Bsky Dreams today that somone said we are only looking to solve computer-shapedproblems, and I think thaï is a phenomenal metaphor to describe this moment. We are looking to solve one Community 1s not computer-shaped. Relationshipe are not computat another's computer-shaped problems. Things that a easily be put into a generator and mañe into ready-made solutions
shaped. Authentic learning is not computer shaped.
But, there are so many computer-shaped problems and I find that making everything into something I can feed into the Claude Code window is so seductive and more than a little thrilling. If I can make it do things that I could never do on my own, then I can be more than I m. But, knowing the difference between forming things into that window and addressing the very real problems that are better solved outsideof it is really difficult work.
Also, that window costs my time. It coste money too. Most of what I cun build. What I can make it do. What computer shaped though, it costs my attention. I am constantly thinking about
problems are all around me.
Perhaps it just comes down to me asking if the problems I'm trying to solve in that window are ones that I'n forcing to be there because I can't face them elsewhere. because I'm afraid ofthekind or effortthey will require of me. But, sometines that effort 1 s the right action to take. Sometimes the window isn't showing me the future. It is just showing me another way to avoid the hard work of living, of finding human-shaped problems and sitting
with them long enough that the solutions become the work itself. That the window to the outdoors becomes more inttiguing than the one into the code.